Reading Group Week 24
Hi. This email isn't the usual format; we're going to bail out of Riot. Strike. Riot. We'll move on to another book in 2 weeks. More on that further down.
But first... Let's take a breather.
Call for essays and other media
A few weeks ago I posted a call for links, and then I shared them back out and later we discussed them. I'd like to do that again.
If you have an article, essay, a piece of poetry, a short story, some art, a eulogy, or anything else, please forward it my way and I'll share a list of things to check out.
Additionally, if you know of Palestinians' fundraisers that need attention or help getting traction, please let me know that as well. I'll include links to fundraisers.
As before, you can reach out in a number of ways:
- on signal: ali.01
- on bluesky: @ali-alkhatib.com
- on twitter: @_alialkhatib
- on mastodon: @ali@masto.al2.in
- on email: hi@al2.in (or reply to this email)
We'll take a break from books for 2 weeks, looking at some poetry, articles, and artwork from around the internet; and then we'll move on.
Next book(s)
After this break, we'll move to reading a pair of books concurrently.
The book to buy is A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon. You can buy A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon here..
The other book will be Capital by Karl Marx. Let's talk briefly about Capital, its translations, and your options:
My understanding is that there are three major translations. The first translation (chronologically) by Engels in the 1880s; then by Fowkes in the 1970s; and most recently a translation by Reitter, which came out last year.
- The Engels translation is here. You can download it for free.
- The second translation, by Fowkes in the 70s, is widely established and is most likely what people have been reading, quoting, and citing. You can get it here.
- The new translation by Reitter, published in late 2024, uses more modern language and offers lots of translation notes that might be interesting if you're that kind of linguistics nerd. I'm taking this opportunity to be that that kind of nerd, and going to pick up this translation. You can get it here.
A note on reading both
I'll try to focus on A Dying Colonialism and I'll occasionally mention Capital in newsletter emails, but I'm going to keep my discussion about Capital to the signal chat and Saturday calls. In any case, I'll try to delineate and give context when I'm pulling together ideas from both books, or digressing and talking about Capital. If you can't read both books at once, please stick around for A Dying Colonialism. Or Capital. Whichever works for you.
Okay, that's it. Thank you for following along. I realize this is very hectic, but I've been struggling to latch on to Riot. Strike. Riot over the past few weeks, and then over the weekend it became clear I wasn't the only one. I really don't want to drag us through reading a book that we're not resonating with; breaking it off and picking another book seemed like the better option.
I'm still figuring out what to do with Riot. Strike. Riot (I might try to speed through it for closure), but whatever I do about the book, I'll share my plans in the signal group chat.
PS: You should join the Signal group chat if you can. It's where I make decisions, get feedback about plans, and increasingly it's where we have more casual conversations about these books, and share links to interesting articles and stuff.